


I Wish I Was Scared

by wordswordswords7



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, David Rose Deserves Nice Things, Detox, Drug Addiction, Flashbacks, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, New York City, Pre-Schitt's Creek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:22:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27586034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordswordswords7/pseuds/wordswordswords7
Summary: In the months before the rug is pulled out from under his family, David is already trying to change—to be better.During a solo attempt at detoxing in his NYC apartment, David faces the thing that he and his mother truly have most in common, and his reason for getting clean.
Relationships: Alexis Rose & David Rose, David Rose & Moira Rose, Patrick Brewer & Alexis Rose, Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Stevie Budd & David Rose, Stevie Budd & Patrick Brewer
Comments: 11
Kudos: 103





	1. Chapter 1

Objectively, he knows he shouldn’t be alone right now. He knows that this would be so much safer, so much more likely to end well, if there were people here to keep an eye on him. Medical professionals who have made careers out of pulling junkie rich kids from the abyss. Instead, he's alone in his New York City loft and he thinks he might be dying.

And that’s maybe not as scary as it should be.

David's laying in the tub, propped up against the cool porcelain. Every time his body switches between being unbearably hot to intolerably cold, the tub goes from feeling like ecstasy against his sweat-soaked skin to feeling like the fifth level of hell. The tremors won't stop and his brain is on fire, and he thinks maybe he's crying out in desperation. But if that's the case, the empty silence of the apartment and the rush of rain against the large loft windows is the only response he gets. 

If only he could sleep through the worst of the withdrawal, but he can’t. If only wakefulness was comparable to alertness, but it’s not. Instead, he gasps and shakes through a semi-conscious haze—unable to focus and equally unable to shut down completely. 

He is aware of one thing. One horribly lonely thing. He wants someone here to hold his hand and to card their fingers through his hair. He wants the only person alive who might do that for him, if he asked.

Unbidden and unwelcome, memories of his mother rise through the miasma. But it’s not Moira that David is thinking of. 

* * *

_“Mommy?” Alexis’ voice is small and David has to mentally force his body to move so that he’s standing in front of her and blocking her view of the woman posed like a wax figure in the grand jacuzzi tub in their parents’ ensuite._

_“Mom,” he bites out forcibly._

_Moira doesn’t seem to hear him. Her face is ashen under the streaks of makeup caked beneath her eyes and across slackened lips. He quickly turns around so he’s facing Alexis and he grabs both of her tiny shoulders._

_“What’s wrong with Mommy?”_

_She isn’t supposed to see this. David had sworn she wouldn’t ever have to see this._

_“Lex,” he says in a voice that sounds strange to his ears. “Lex, go find Adelina.”_

_“But–” she’s trying to peak around his shoulder but he gives her a shake, a little harder than he means to. “Ow, David. That hurt!”_

_“I’m sorry,” the words rush out of his mouth, but he needs her to listen. “I’m sorry. Please, I need you to go find Adelina right now. Fast as a bunny, understand? I need her help. Right now.”_

_She’s not even five yet and he’s worried she’ll get sidetracked but, like always, Alexis surprises him with her fierceness. She sets her trembling chin and looks at him solemnly with her crystalline blue eyes, so unlike his own._

_“Like a bunny,” she says with a nod and runs from the room._

_David turns back to the scene he’d walked into seconds before._

_“Mom?”_

_Nothing._

_He takes a step forward, breath hitching in his chest. She can’t be…_

_“MOIRA!”_

_A flinch. An eye flutter. David’s heart is in his throat as he reaches around her body to pull the plug out of the drain—the arms of his long-sleeved shirt soaking through. He thinks he recognizes the dress she’s wearing. Thinks maybe he saw her wearing it as she left the house two nights ago. And he knows someone ought to get her out of the wet clothes, that she’ll get sick (more sick than the pills have made her) if she stays in them. But it’s such a strange and intimate thing to do, undressing your mother, and she’s bigger than him and heavier. So he just stares at the black sequins in a frozen state of embarrassment._

_It almost overwhelms him._

_Her body shivers uncontrollably then, and David jumps to do the next best thing he can think of. He pulls every towel he sees into the tub, covering every inch of his mother except for her face. And then he grabs as much of the bedding as he can carry from the bedroom and piles that on top of her too._

_David stands back and breathes. And waits._

_He needs a grown-up. Why is there never a real grown-up around here?_

_“John…”_

_His mother’s eyes flutter open, glassy and not seeing him. Not really._

_“It’s me,” he says, just above a whisper. “It’s David.”_

_And she might be about to say something more but suddenly there’s a flurry of movement behind him and Adelina is there._

_“David? Dios Mio, Mrs Rose...David, go to Alexis, my love.”_

_“But–”_

_“Now.” There’s no room for argument in her voice and she actually follows him out to the bedroom but ushers him to the hall while she makes for the phone beside the bed._

_“David?”_

_He wants to stay and be a part of this—to take care of this mess for his mother who wouldn’t like that Adelina is calling 9-1-1 to bring strangers here—but Alexis is watching him from the doorway looking wide-eyed and lost. So he drags himself away from the room and takes her by her doll-like hand so that they can go and sit on the winding staircase leading to the foyer._

_“Is mommy sick?”_

_“Yes.”_

_"Are we going to get sick?"_

_“Not like that. Not ever.”_

_He’s watching the door for any sign of the paramedics, and without looking away he pulls her snuggly to his side, unwilling to let her go._

* * *

Alexis swims in his mind, around and around like a gyre. They haven’t spoken in months, but he can’t stop thinking about her as a little girl finding their mother half-dead in the tub, and a part of him wonders if it will be her who finds him if the detox fails? He doesn’t want that—has never wanted that for her.

There’s a stark difference between then and now, he thinks and hangs onto the thought for dear life.

Moira had OD’d that morning. David is doing the opposite, isn’t he? He’s purging all the toxic shit out of his body, not drowning himself in more of the same. Because he’s always hated that (despite his promises) of all the similarities between him and his mother, this is such a huge one. He desperately doesn’t want Alexis to find him lifeless in a tub one of these days. He _wants_ to be better in all the ways their mother has never been able to be.

If he was thinking clearly he knows that in order for Alexis to find him she would need to be around for five fucking minutes. Not chasing a different kind of death-defying high across the world with...who’s the latest? Stavros something-or-other. Really, if he was _truly_ thinking straight, he would know that what's happening in this bathroom, in this tub, at this very moment is probably the reason for the distance between them.

For a while, David’s focus is pulled away from his sister and he is forced to contend with the tremors ricocheting along his body. 

He wishes, with sudden desperation, that he was scared of what’s happening to him now; that the thought of putting poison into his body would frighten him more than it does. He wishes he was scared of what the pills, the coke, and the hard shit were doing to his brain. Instead, it numbs him and some days the numbness—as much as the high—is worth the chase.

But David knows the bigger problem here isn’t the drugs, it’s who’s feeding them to him. It’s who’s been dragging him out to clubs and who’s been saying yes to literally anything offered up by strangers in the dark corners of bars and harshly lit bathrooms. David’s bigger problem than the drugs—his own worst enemy—is himself. 

The rest doesn’t scare him, but maybe these days what he’s really learning to fear is who he's becoming. And maybe that will be enough to change, to become someone that could look his 9-year-old self in the eye. To feel guilty about going back on a promise he made to a sister who still calls him first in a crisis. To become a version of David Rose who isn't slowly killing himself.

It has to be enough.

Life has to get better than this.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little something that was inspired by the song This Is Not Who I Want To Be by Joanna Sternberg.


	2. Epilogue

The bell _dings_ and David looks up from where he’s unpacking the new toners in the stockroom. Through the open door he sees Alexis leaning against the counter, grinning brightly at Patrick. Something is said that makes them both laugh, and David can’t help but smile at the sight of his husband and sister casually making plans for tonight. 

Wine and pizza back at the house with Stevie. Maybe a movie, maybe a board game—maybe not if David and Stevie haven’t recovered from the last attempt at friendly competition—but more than likely just long unwinding conversation that will carry them into the night. Alexis will sleep in the guest room like she always does when she comes up from New York, and will use the toothbrush she leaves in the bathroom between visits (next to Stevie’s own emergency spare). Whenever he sees them tucked away in the guest bathroom's medicine cabinet, the sight pulls at his chest and makes David incandescently happy in a way he’s not sure he could ever explain. The relaxed domesticity of it—the promise of return trips and of a shared sense of home amongst family and friends—is light and weighty all at once.

If you had told him eight years ago that this would be his life…

He’s feeling a little like that now, as he shelves bottles and turns the labels forward methodically. There’s no real occasion for her visit this time, just a break in both their calendars and the itching (but unspoken) need to be in the same room together again. To fill the space around them with familiar bickering and teasing; a love language made up of button pushing—and if pressed, soft looks and tight hugs—that only they can speak. 

“David! I’m stealing Patrick!” her voice rings out all the way to the stockroom, and he rolls his eyes but a smile tugs at his lips unbidden.

“He’s working Alexis!” he calls back to her, sounding more exasperated than he really is because she is nothing if not exasperating.

“Oh my god, he _needs to eat_ though.”

The ensuing back and forth, as ridiculous as it is, feels good and right even if Patrick ends up abandoning them both to make the lunch run to the Cafe alone. Because Patrick gets it somehow. He gets how much David has been missing her so far from home in New York.

Upon his return, and as the three of them eat their lunches in the back of the store with Alexis talking their ears off about her latest PR win, the thought of New York stops him short for a sharp moment. He watches her bright smile and wide eyes and thinks back to a night that feels like a lifetime ago. Of a fear that he had become the kind of person he had promised her he’d never be, and of crawling out of that pit alone with a loose and wavering hope that one day she might come back into his life with a permanence they’d only known in childhood. 

It catches the breath in his lungs until she’s booping him on the nose and saying something about Interflix’s new Greenwich Village offices. He swats her hand away with a haughty glare but catches Patrick smiling softly at the exchange.

Yes, David’s not sure how he got here but he knows for certain that _here_ is infinitely better than every moment of his life from _before_. And right now he is feeling absolutely, incandescently happy.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something that was inspired by the song This Is Not Who I Want To Be by Joanna Sternberg.


End file.
